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Phishing Example: Help Desk Notice

March 4, 2016

What makes this a Phishing message?

The weird special characters in the subject line are highly suspicious.

The sender of the message has been forged to appear to be from a real person in the Capistrano school district (the name has been changed). The culprit who sent this message didn't bother to readdress it from a person in the "berkeley.edu" domain.

The recipient address is an email alias ("info") in an unknown domain ("@live.com"). You would expect a notification such as this to be sent directly to the person's address.

The red font color, the poor grammar, and the weird special characters in the body of the message are all very suspicious.